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Imagine what FEMA would be like if it had a $100-billion budget, really cool uniforms and the power to blow things up on national television. Congratulationsyou just invented NASA.

NASA is FEMA with rockets. Who in the world would want to give them $104 billion?

The answer, as usual, is George W. Bush. This guy is like a lottery winner on a benderhe can't give away money fast enough. Unfortunately, it's not his money. It's ours.

When he's not spending $200 billion of our dough to transform the Middle East (good idea) or dumping another $200 billion to eradicate poverty from the Gulf Coast (yeah, right), he's digging into taxpayers' pockets for $104 billion for the geniuses who run America's space program (are you out of your tiny little mind?)

NASA, in its proud tradition of pressing toward ever-new frontiers, has come up with a new American mission for a new American century, a far-flung vision of a future beyond imagination. Give us $104 billion, says NASA administrator Michael Griffin, and we will boldly go where no man has gone before….the MOON! And it will only take us 13 years to get there!

If this was a movie, somebody on the set would be shouting "Get me re-write!"

Maybe the pocket-protector crowd at Houston Control are too busy to get to the multiplex themselves, but they need to put The Right Stuff and Apollo 13 on their Netflix home page. Going to the moon is so passe', we've even made a hit movie about not getting there.

When President Kennedy committed America to "achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth," the reasons were clear: to do something great that would reflect the greatness of our nation, and to kick the commies right in the technocrats. We got there first because we're the best.

In the heat of the Cold War, that NASA mission made sense.

So why are we going back to the moon today? Well, according to NASA, one reason is to "scour the moon for water, hydrogen and ice" that could be used on a future mission to Mars. That's right: $100 billion to look for water. On the moon.

The irony of that argument will not be lost on the folks of New Orleans, who might suggest that a more productive search for water could be conducted in their second-story apartments.

Look, I'm no scientist. And normally I'd be the first to say, "Hey, who am I to question these scientists?" But we're not talking about scientists. We're talking about government employees.

We're talking about NASA, where they accidentally slammed a Mars explorer into the surface of the Red Planet because they forgot to convert kilometers into miles. We're talking about bright boys who sent up the $100 million Hubble telescope fitted with a defective lens (oops!), performed an amazing repair mission that has turned Hubble into a national treasure (hooray!) but now that it's doing amazing science, want to abandon it in space (D'oh!).

And we should never forget that these are the government employees responsible for wasting the lives of 14 brave astronauts, all killed in service to one of the dumbest, most inefficient and scientifically-useless boondoggles in world history, the space shuttle program. Not a single scientifically-significant act has been performed on the shuttle that could not have been done more cheaply and safely using an unmanned vehicle In fact, NASA's handing of the space shuttle has been so inept that, in July of this year, the entire program was grounded…while the shuttle Discovery was still in space.

Houston, we really have a problem…

So let's get to the real reason why the shuttle program is still around, and the real reason we're going to blow $104 billion over the next 13 years to go back to the moon: government jobs.

When asked if America should set aside space exploration for the moment because of budget pressures from the Katrina disaster, NASA administrator Griffin quickly pointed out that many of government jobs created by the space program are in the Gulf region.

And there it is. NASA's manned-space program is a huge government-jobs scam that takes billions of dollars from taxpayers and gives back the occasional video of astronauts listening to rock music on the space shuttle, an insignificant bit of scientific research and, all too often, dead people. Couldn't we just put everyone at NASA on welfare? It would cost less and nobody would get hurt.

Meanwhile, hasn't anyone at NASA noticed that, even assuming everything goes right with the new moon mission, we're still going backwards? They want to go to the moon in 13 years. The first time we went, it only took us 10, and we'd never done it before!

Then again, math has never been NASA's strong suit. For example, there have been 114 shuttle flights, and two of them have blown up. However, NASA claims that the existing failure rate of the space shuttle program is just 1-in-220.

114 flights. Two failures. Do the math.

Unless you work for NASA, in which case you should ask someone to do the math for you.

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